Work is underway in the Champlain Islands this week that aims to improve sportfishing in Lake Champlain and its major tributaries. At the Ed Weed Fish Culture Station, a fish hatchery in Grand Isle, the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife is boosting the walleye population through captive breeding. This is the time of year the species naturally spawns, so a team from the department went out and caught male and female walleye. They gathered literally millions of eggs gathered from the spawning females by pressing on the underside of their bodies, and combined those eggs with sperm collected from the male fish. Hatchery staff then gently swirled the material in small tubs to fertilize the eggs.Paige Blaker, the fish production supervisor at the Ed Weed Fish Culture Station, explained that in the wild, walleye have a low survival rate from the egg-to-hatch stage. Without human help, Blaker said, out of 100-200,000 eggs per female, maybe only a small handful of fish would actually survive to adulthood each spring. However, giving them a start at the hatchery should help dramatically increase those numbers, Blaker noted."They're already feeling the effects of stuff like global climate change and pollution," Blaker said in an interview with NBC5 News. "On top of the fishing pressure, they just wouldn't be able to do it by themselves. So we're here to basically help assist them and boost their population numbers. That way, people can still enjoy walleye fishing on a day-to-day basis."The fertilized eggs are housed in a specially-designed incubation room where the water temperature will help them grow. In several months, biologists will release the baby walleye in various spots in the Winooski River where they think they'll have a good chance of making it.Walleye season starts the first Saturday in May, and anglers are already excited."Walleye are hard to catch," fisherman Chad Lambert, the president of the Lake Champlain Walleye Association, said to explain some of the appeals of the species to anglers. "Not everybody can just throw a lure over and catch any amount of them. They're tricky. So I think that tricky angling aspect definitely plays true to walleye fishermen. And table fare. They're probably one of the best fish in the lake to eat."The captive breeding for walleye rotates between the Winooski, Poultney, Missisquoi, and Lamoille Rivers, Blaker said. Biologists insisted the breeding work underway this week doesn't hurt the fish. They said they take special care in handling them, in fact, pointing to how one of the females they caught for the spawning work appeared to be about 25 years old.